|
|
|
|
||
For most of us, backing up our computers is a little like going to the dentist: it's good for you but you always put it off. If only there was a device with a "magic button" to push that would do a backup job quickly and unobtrusively. Poof! There goes your excuse. Maxtor has rolled out its Personal Storage 5000 line, which includes a "one-touch" -- pardon me, "OneTouch (TM)" -- backup button system coupled to Dantz Retrospect Express. (See sidebar below.)
There are four units in the product family: The $400 5000XT, which I tested, is a 250GB, 5400 rpm external drive with both USB 2.0 and FireWire Support. Yeah, that's right: 250 GB. There also an 80 GB, 5400 rpm, USB 2.0-only
5000LE priced at $200.
The XT will support a small business or workgroup and is also a choice for power users. The LE
(below) is a good value for home users. While both will work as an external hard drive for most purposes, multimedia production and like needs would be better served by Maxtor's 7200 rpm 5000DV units in 200 GB ($388) and 120 GB ($332) capacities. Use cannot be any more simple. Half the work is unpacking the drive, cables, power supply, etc. from their protective cocoon. Thereafter, you put the setup disk in your PC, run it, installing the drivers and Retrospect Express. The you connect the drive to power and your PC, and you are in business. OneTouch is what it says: There is a button on the front of the unit. You push it and it runs Retrospect. When it is done, it exits. Backup speeds are substantially faster than tape or CD-R, And because of Retrospect's excellent incremental backup methodology, use of the drive's capacity is very efficient. I used to rely on automated backup to keep me protected, but OneTouch is so simple that after a few days of testing, it became a reflex to hit the button when I was going to be away from the PC for a few minutes. The one problem I encountered was that Maxtor's setup presupposes that the user does not have Retrospect already in place. I do, and setup was flummoxed by the presence of an existing installation. One workaround is to just let the setup program overwrite your version of Retrospect, then re-install yours. No settings get lost. Or in Windows XP you can ignore Maxtor's setup instructions, plug the drive it, and have XP run its usual "found new hardware" routine. (This probably works in other versions of Windows, but I only tested in XP.) Either way, you just need to be sure you have a backup script called "Maxtor OneTouch" (without the quotes), as that is the job the button will run. There has been gap for some time in SOHO backup ever since Travan became inadequate for modern capacity hard drives. I have tested various new tape formats for TNPC and found them too expensive for most users. External hard drives were problematic because of connection speeds. However, USB 2.0 and FireWire have solved that and plummeting drive prices, even at huge capacities, make the economics work. Tape does have the advantage of allowing you to move a spare backup set offsite, but you can do this with external drives by using two of them. Eric Ullman, Dantz Development Corp.'s technical marketing chief, crunched the numbers and found that hard drives are cheaper than prevailing digital tape formats. Extrapolating his numbers for the 250 GB drives, two 5000 XTs actually are cheaper to protect 250 GB worth of data than Sony AIT1, Ecrix VXA-1, or OnStream ADR2 systems. (Those are the tape systems I had tested and are the lowest priced systems with greater capacity and speed than Travan.) And the pricing advantage still holds as capacities increase and you need more drives. This is because the media costs for 250 GB worth of tapes is expensive in all formats, plus those drives are more expensive to begin with. Incidentally, the mathematics also suggest that for backing up one or two PCs, you should consider a pair of 5000LEs as an alternative to one 5000XT. OneTouch is just the right touch for simple system backups. (c) 2004 Al Gordon. Retrospect Gets FriendlierNo good deed goes unpunished, and so the aforementioned Eric Ullman suffered for tipping me off on the economics of hard drive backup by having to wait for a review of Retrospect 6.0 until a Maxtor drive became available for test. Sorry about that, Eric. So belatedly here's the scoop: if you have been holding off from Retrospect because its interface was too forbidding, 6.0 will be a big help. Dantz adopted a Web-Page like design with a menu bar on the left and dialogs with buttons in the middle to guide you through its many features.
Pricing also has improved with the addition of a "Professional" version ($85) that supports SOHO networks and slots neatly into place as a helpful upgrade to Retrospect Express. Functionally, the main advance in 6.0 is the capability for open file backup, which primarily will be of interest in corporate settings because of its dependence on the NTFS file system. So if that doesn't excite you and you already have mastered the 5.x interface, there isn't a compelling case to upgrade. Retrospect's core strength is its unmatched capabilities for managing incremental backups and to take "snapshots" of your system at the time you backed it up. After your first pass to collect all data on your system, each subsequent backup only needs to gather changes, additions, and subtractions -- allowing for speedier jobs and less media consumption. Further, these capabilities carry over into the critical task of restoring. As noted in past reviews of Retrospect, these days a hard drive failure is only one danger. A virus infection or a software installation gone wrong also can seriously corrupt your system. So rolling back to a "snapshot" of a working configuration is a lifesaver. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ You can reach Al Gordon at:
 Return to Top
|
||
|
|
||
TNPC Hot Tips:
|
This is supplemental information to the article:
